We Made Ice Cream for the School Fair
Elena came home with the idea on a Tuesday and the fair was on the Saturday, which in this family is enough time for exactly one batch and no second attempt. We made four tubs of vanilla and one of strawberry, and the whole thing turned on a bag of ice and a folding table.
The ice was the problem. We had one small bag left in the freezer, which does not cover five tubs for three hours, so on Friday morning my father walked to the fish market and came back with a sack of crushed ice and a lecture about buying ice by the sack. The tubs went into the cooler with the ice packed all around them, not on top, which is the detail everybody gets wrong, and the cooler stayed in the shade by the side wall of the yard until we walked over.
At the fair we set up near the gate so the people walking in could smell it, which worked, because the first thing my mother said to anyone who stopped was that the strawberry one had fruit in it and the vanilla one did not, and that is the entire sales pitch we needed. We gave small spoons out with it. We wrote the flavour on a card in my mother's handwriting because she is the only one of us with handwriting that people trust.
My father stood at the table the whole time and did not eat a single spoonful, and when we packed up at the end he said that the ice cream was only good because he had carried it, and my mother said that the ice cream was only good because she had stirred it, and Elena said it was only good because it was free, which is not quite true and which nobody minded.